Last week’s horrifying aircraft collision at Reagan National Airport (DCA) has focused attention on air traffic control (ATC) staffing. According to press reports, the controller responsible for monitoring helicopter traffic had gone home that night, leaving that responsibility to a second controller responsible for “local traffic.” That apparently was not the only short-staffing in the DCA tower; at the time the passenger jet and helicopter collided, two controllers were doing the work of a team of four. Another bit of news: The previous night, a different passenger jet aborted landing at DCA because a helicopter was in its flight path, and there have been other recent incidents.
That news will likely become more fodder in the Blue Team – Red Team fight, with Democrats criticizing the Trump administration for “strangling” the federal workforce and Republicans responding, Weren’t you just in charge of air traffic control and the rest of that workforce?
They’ll both miss an important insight from the tragedy: the peril of Big Government on the cheap.
If the double-duty controllers story proves correct (Christian Britschgi offers some reasons to be skeptical), then more controllers are needed—at the very least at Reagan, if not more broadly. But should they continue to be federal employees? And is danger higher if they are? After all, plenty of first-world countries have private air traffic control and airports with great safety and service records.
That should gnaw at both Blue and Red Teams. Democrats typically want bigger government that provides more services, while Republicans—ostensibly—want smaller government at lower taxpayer cost. What we often get is government that tries to do a lot of stuff at low current tax rates—or, put another way, Big Government on the cheap (and with big deficits). Problem is, cheap often means poor quality. From ATC, to our soon-to-be-insolvent public pension system, to the tinderbox of public lands, and many more examples, plenty of America’s policy issues are at least partly the product of Big Government on the cheap.
This isn’t the result of some twisted Red–Blue compromise. Lawmaker in both parties have considerable incentive to offer constituents plenty of services but then hold down (or hide) expenditures. The result is government that does lots of stuff, but often not well.
DCA is a microcosm of this. For those who live outside the Beltway and are unfamiliar with the airport, it operates almost like a private airport for the political class. Despite its small size and congested location (which may also be contributors to the collision), it handles flights to an astounding number of places so that lawmakers can get themselves, their staffers, and special interests to and from their districts conveniently. The Wichita route that last week’s plane was flying had been added just last year at the behest of Kansas lawmakers. The result of all these politically motivated flights is a highly burdened government operation—Big Government on the cheap.
This should give the Trump administration serious pause. Before the collision, the big news stories of last week were a pair of administration self-inflicted controversies over an Office of Management and Budget memo trying to freeze large portions of federal spending and an OMB email offering federal workers several months’ pay in exchange for their “deferred resignations.” (A similar email went out from OMB specifically to air traffic controllers the night after the collision.) Both are exercises in Big Government on the cheap: cutting money for responsibilities the federal government has taken on.
If the administration truly wanted smaller government, it should be working with the (Republican-controlled) Congress to statutorily pare back federal responsibilities. Such policymaking is hard and requires political capital and consensus-building. It’s also something Trump—whatever his rhetoric—did not pursue in his first presidency. There is little reason to think that will change in his second. So, there will likely be more failures from Big Government on the cheap in the future. Hopefully, they will not be as tragic as last week.
